This is the companion page for my PyOhio 2026 talk. Everything I demoed is here to take home: the slides, the notebooks, and the dataset.
LIKE is the tool most of us reach for first when we search free text. You end up chaining OR and NOT LIKE clauses to patch each miss, and you are still reading every record by hand.
The talk works through what to reach for instead, using 448 free-text notes from a fictional dog spa.
Take it home
- Code and notebooks on GitHub – start with
search_toolkit.ipynb. Each method is a few lines you can lift straight into your own DuckDB project.go_hybrid.ipynbis the full walkthrough that follows the talk. - Download the slides (PDF)
Run the code
git clone https://github.com/jamalhansen/go-hybrid
cd go-hybrid
uv sync
uv run jupyter lab search_toolkit.ipynb
The first run downloads the embedding model (all-MiniLM-L6-v2, about 90 MB). After that it is fully offline.
The dataset is synthetic and curated so each method fails visibly. Bring a note of your own, drop it in, and see which tools find it.
If you saw the talk, thank you for coming. If you have questions, reach out.
